Evidence, Memory and the Malleable Photograph

SCENE 5 (1) pp. 37–46 Intellect Limited 2017 Scene Volume 5 Number 1 © 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/scene.5.1.37_1 MICHELLE BOGRE Parsons School of Design Evidence, memory and the malleable photograph ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article explores the capacity of the photograph to furnish evidence, which photography derives both from its indexicality and from the visual accuracy of the raw image. evidence Photographs achieve the status of evidence not because the photograph itself has memory any implicit identity but rather because the State recognized that the photograph fraud could provide proof of identification – mug shots – as early as 1850 when police activism departments hired photographers to take mug shots and crime scene photographs. revolution Courts accepted the photograph as evidence as early as 1859 and continue today, even employing ‘Instagram’ officers whose job entails monitoring Instagram accounts of persons of interest. The article then explores why the photograph remains believ- able today to the public even with contemporary discourse about the malleability of the photograph. In her seminal text, On Photography, Susan Sontag wrote: ‘[p]hotographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it’ ([1977] 2001). In the 35 years since Sontag wrote that, critics and scholar have repeatedly questioned whether photographs can ever be evidence or unequivocally stated that they cannot. Despite the volumes written by scholars questioning the veracity and vicissitudes of the photograph, particularly the digital photograph, the viewing public still generally believes that a photograph is true, and as true, proof (evidence) of what happened. Why? 37 04_SCENE_5.1_Bogre_37-46.indd 37 21/08/17 11:41 AM Michelle Bogre A photograph’s capacity to furnish evidence derives both from its ‘indexicality’ and from the visual accuracy of the raw image. Indexicality, a term coined by philosopher Charles Peirce, ‘depends on a physical relationship between the object photographed and the image finally created’ (Gunning 2008: 24). The image on a film negative literally comes from the light reflect- ing off the object in front of the lens and falling onto light-sensitive material. The image on a memory card comes from ‘data about light that is encoded in a matrix of numbers’ (Gunning 2008: 24). In the context of indexicality, little difference exists between the film negative and the digital negative. The relationship between light and proximity to the object forms the basis for the public’s belief in the ‘truth’ of a photograph and its value as evidence. Even when almost all digital images are retouched post production, the public still believes in photographic truth, in part because most post production only alters the original and often only slightly; post production usually does not so completely erase the original images as to negate its indexicality. John Tagg would note that this implicit trust in the photograph derives not from the photograph itself, which has no implicit identity, but from status within the sphere it inhabits. Writing about the photograph he states: ‘[i]ts status as technology varies with the power relations which invest it’ (Tagg 1999). For the photograph as evidence, that value and status exist in the sphere granted by the State. Police departments and law enforcement agen- cies in the United Kingdom and the United States understood the value of the photograph for proof of identification as early as the mid-1800s and indeed police departments hired photographers as early as 1850 to photograph crime scenes and to take mugshots. US courts have been granting the photograph a privileged status as evidence – a guaranteed witness of the actuality of events that it represented – as early as 1859 when an appellate court accepted photographs in a land grant case that hinged on whether a document of title was forged (Luco v. United States 1859). The appellate court accepted the photographs because ‘… as evidence, the photograph admitted no ambiguity’ (Green-Lewis 1996). In 1860, in Marcy v. Barnes, a case involving a disputed Figure 1: Catherine O’Neill, mug shot, facing front and to her left (1906). 38 Scene www.intellectbooks.com 39 04_SCENE_5.1_Bogre_37-46.indd 38 21/08/17 11:41 AM Evidence, memory and the malleable photograph signature on a promissory note, magnified photographic copies of signatures were admitted as evidence along with the testimony of photographer Albert S. Southworth. After the jury found for the plaintiff, the defendant appealed and challenged the admission of photographic evidence. The appellate court accepted the photographic evidence because ‘… we are unable to perceive any valid objection to the use of such prepared representations’ (Marcy v. Barnes 1860). An 1869 case challenging a photograph’s legal status as evidence involved a case of fraud against a Boston, Massachusetts’s photographer William H. Mumler (Cloutier 2004; Kaplan 2008). Mumler, a self-taught photographer, experimented with making self-portraits in which a shadowy, ghost-like apparition appeared. Mumler claimed that he did not know how the ‘ghost’ figures appeared. Even fellow photographers who claimed to have followed him during the photographic sessions and into the darkroom claimed not to know how he was producing these spirit photographs. As the ghosts mate- rialized in his images Mumler garnered accolades and a thriving career. The jig was up when the same ghost – who in reality was a Boston resident very much alive – turned up in two photographs. In 1869 in New York City, Mumler was arrested for fraud and accused of selling photographs under false pretenses. Both Mumler and the photograph as evidence were on trial. During a preliminary hearing before New York City Court of Special Sessions Judge Dowling to assess whether there was sufficient evidence to send the case to a grand jury, the expert photographic witnesses for the prosecution testified that photographs could be manipulated in the darkroom. The testimony was complicated because these same witnesses wanted to preserve the authority of the photograph as evidence. They carefully empha- sized the mechanical (and not malleable) process of photography. When explaining how photographs could be manipulated, they pointed out how such manipulation was easily detectable and that manipulation took skill and time, attempting to mitigate damage to the idea that photographs were not true. Just as bad counterfeit money does not discredit genuine money ‘… fake photographs are not alarming unless there is a risk that they might be confused with authentic ones’ (Mnookin 1998: 37). If fakery took time and skill, it was not so much the photograph that was on trial, but the photographer or as activist photographer Lewis Hine stated in 1909: ‘[p]hotographs don’t lie, but liars may photograph’ (1980: 110–13). Witnesses for the defence supported the photograph as evidence, testifying that they believed in spir- its because they had seen Mumler’s photographs: ‘… the pictures themselves furnish evidence in their gauze-like appearance, that has not been imitated’ (Mnookin 1998: 37). After seven days of testimony, the judge reluctantly dropped the case against Mumler because he said that the prosecution had not proven that the photographs were fraudulent and had not introduced any evidence that Mumler was a fraud. Photographs became routine evidentiary tools in the early 1900s and were used to prove, among other things, locations of buildings and terrains in land disputes, accidents and to distinguish corpuscles of human blood from animal blood. Judges grasped the idea of idexicality even as they did not use the term, describing photographs as ‘light printed pictures produced by the operation of natural laws and not by the hand of man’ (Porter v. Buckley [1906] 1928). Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote about photography, ‘[f]orm is henceforth divorced from matter […] Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it’ (1859). 38 Scene www.intellectbooks.com 39 04_SCENE_5.1_Bogre_37-46.indd 39 21/08/17 11:41 AM Michelle Bogre In 1911, Thomas Jennings was convicted of murder based on a photograph introduced as evidence that he left his fingerprints on a freshly painted fence, even as eyewitness testimony was ruled inadmissible because it was contradic- tory (Green-Lewis 1996: 187). Most recently, the US Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata ordered the State of California to reduce its prison population to 137.5 per cent of capacity, based in part on photographic evidence submitted at trial (Brown v. Plata 2011). The photographic evidence was so compelling that three black and white images were attached to the Supreme Court’s decision. The San Francisco police department employs an Instagram officer who monitors Instagram feeds (Mcalone 2015). In one recent case, Officer Eduard Ochoa had been following an account, ‘40glock’, that displayed photographs of the Instagram account owner (identified in court papers only as ‘K.B.’ because he was a minor) out on probation, with a gun tucked in his waistband. Police used these images as the basis to search K.B.’s house because being on probation prohibits gun ownership. An appellate court affirmed the firearms convic- tion, accepting the Instagram photos as evidence, noting that a photograph is authenticated ‘by showing it is a fair and accurate representation of the scene depicted’ (The People v. K.B. 2015). The Courts are nonplussed about the poten- tial for digital manipulation, observing correctly that image manipulation can be verified. Judges and jurors in the early twentieth century believed photographs, but scholars and critics challenged the photograph as truth because a photograph was mere description and it was malleable, both while it was being taken (a photographer makes many decisions such as lens focal length, point of view, angle, exposure, etc.) and then in post production.

Load more